How boots of first world war troops brought a foreign invader to Scotland

Scientists have discovered an unexpected leftover of the first world war on a Scottish university campus. A fungus, foreign to Scotland
but relatively common in Europe, has been found growing in the grounds
of the former Craiglockhart hospital where war poets Siegfried Sassoon
and Wilfred Owen met in 1917.

Its discoverer, ecologist Abbie
Patterson, believes British troops who visited Craiglockhart for
treatment for shell shock brought Clavulinopsis cinereoides to Scotland after picking up spores on their boots while tramping through the mud of Flanders.

"Group
photographs taken during the Great War show soldiers and nurses lined
up on the very grassy bank where I discovered the fungus," said
Patterson. "It is hard not to make a direct link between these soldiers
and the fact that this fungus – which is completely foreign to Scotland
but not to Europe – was growing there. Its spores may have been brought
over to this country after being picked up by soldiers in the trenches."...